Hiromi Goto

Hiromi Goto is a fiction writer, cultural critic, arts advocate, youth organizer, and teacher of creative writing. She was born in Chiba-ken, Japan, and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1969. They lived on the west coast of British Columbia for eight years before moving to Nanton, Alberta, a small town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Hiromi attended the University of Calgary and graduated in 1989 with a BA in Humanities (English/Art).

Goto is the current Writer-in-Residence with the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She has also been Writer-in-Residence at Vancouver's Emily Carr School of Art and Design, the Vancouver Public Library, and at Simon Frasier University.

Her first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, was the 1995 recipient of the 'Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book Canada and Caribbean Region' and the co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. It has been released in Israel, Italy, and the UK.  In 2001, she was awarded the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and was short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Best Book Award, the Sunburst Award and the Spectrum Award.

Hiromi Goto's other works include children's novels The Kappa Child and The Water of Possibility, as well as the novel, Hopeful Monsters. In 2009 her young adult novel, Half World, was released by Penguin Canada.